Latest Planet Stories

Provided by Dr. Robert Massey, Royal Astronomical Society
Astronomers could soon be able to find rocky planets stretched out by the gravity of the stars they orbit, according to a group of researchers in the United States. The team, led by Prabal Saxena of George Mason University, describe how to detect these exotic worlds in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
An artist’s impression of a stretched rocky planet in orbit around a red dwarf star....

The Dawn spacecraft has delivered a glimpse of Ceres, the largest body in the main asteroid belt, in a new image taken 740,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from the dwarf planet. This is Dawn's best image yet of Ceres as the spacecraft makes its way toward this unexplored world.

Uranus is typically a tranquil, distant blue world that is barely visible using amateur telescopes, but recent turbulent storms on the planet’s surface have been detected by professionals and amateurs alike.

To find other planets, conventional wisdom would tell you to follow the stars. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, however, tell us to follow the dust.

NASA has officially confirmed the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, clearing it to move forward into the development phase. This marks a significant step for the TESS mission, which would search the entire sky for planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets.

Image Caption: Artistic concept of a planetary system. Credit: Wikipedia/NASA/JPL-Caltech
The term Astronomy encompasses a broad range of topics, including the study of stars, galaxies, and planets. In order to focus on the different areas of study, many subfields of astronomy emerge. One such area is the study of planets known, appropriately, as Planetary Astronomy.
Observational Planetary Astronomy
Even within the field of Planetary Astronomy, there are several divisions to...

Planetary and Space Science is a peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1959 and published by Elsevier 15 times per year. As of May 2012, the editor-in-chief is Rita Schulz (The Netherlands).
The journal publishes original research articles and short communications. The main focus is on solar system processes which encompass multiple areas of the natural sciences. Research that involves planetary and space sciences involves many disciplines. Celestial mechanics is part of these...

Terraforming -- Terraforming (literally, "Earth-shaping") is the process of modifying a planet, moon or other body to a more habitable atmosphere, temperature or ecology.
The term was first used in a science fiction novel, 'Seetee Shock' (1940?) by Jack Williamson, but the actual concept is older than that. An example in fiction is 'First and Last Men' by Olaf Stapledon in which Venus is modified, after a long and destructive war with the original inhabitants, who naturally object to the...

Cosmogony -- Cosmogony is the study of the origins of celestial objects. It is most commonly used to refer to the study of the origin of the solar system.
Currently, the most widely accepted theory is that the solar system was formed roughly 5 billion years ago with the collapse of a nebula of gas and dust, likely caused by shock waves generated by a nearby supernova.
The solar system would have formed as a member of a star cluster, now long-since dispersed throughout the Milky Way over...

Terrestrial Planet Finder -- The Terrestrial Planet Finder is a proposed NASA telescope system capable of detecting extrasolar terrestrial planets.
In May 2002, NASA chose two TPF mission architecture concepts for further study and technology development.
Each would use a different means to achieve the same goal - to block the light from a parent star in order to see its much smaller, dimmer planets.
That technology challenge has been likened to finding a firefly near the beam of...

A pivoted catch designed to fall into a notch on a ratchet wheel so as to allow movement in only one direction (e.g. on a windlass or in a clock mechanism), or alternatively to move the wheel in one direction.